Thea Cacchioni		Thea earned her BA in Women’s Studies at UBC and her MA and PhD in Gender Studies and Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. For the past few years, she has worked as a full-time lecturer at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and Okanagan campuses. Thea's research interests include gender; sexuality; health; medicalization; ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction;’ and ‘Sexual Revolution.’ She has published in the journals Sexualities, Sociology, and the Sociology of Health and Illness. She is currently working on a book entitled 'The Labour of Love: Women in the Second Sexual Revolution' (University of Toronto Press). Thea believes that a truly integrated perspective on women’s health does not end in the classroom. In June, 2010 she testified at an FDA advisory hearing against the approval of Flibanserin, a daily anti-depressant drug with several 'unsexy' side-effects (proposed to treat 'hypo-active sexual desire disorder' in pre-menopausal women). In September, 2010 she will attend a counter-symposium to the 'Second Global Symposium on Cosmetic Vaginal Surgery' in Las Vegas, Nevada. During her residency at SFU, she will teach a class on the medicalization of sex, chair an interdisciplinary, multi-media conference on this theme (April 29th-30th, 2011), and engage in other forms of public outreach in this area.

Click here to listen to an interview with Thea on Female Sexual Dysfunction

Click here to hear podcast "Sex for health: Part one of the documentary series The Medicalization of Sex" heard on Meghan Murphy's radio show, The F Word

Final Report from Thea Cacchioni, Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Chair (2010-2011)
Click for downloadable report in pdf format (116 KB) to save or print.

The Ruth Wynn Woodward Professorship (RWWP) in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) at Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a unique endowment that encourages the dissemination of feminist scholarship throughout the community at large. My year as RWWP involved a dynamic mix of feminist teaching, scholarship, and public outreach. This report will summarize the activities I undertook over the course of the year and offer suggestions for the future. Read more...

Public Events

October 9, 2010: Cacchioni, Thea & Carol Wolkowitz (2010) 'Treating Women's Sexual Difficulties: Touch as Social Interaction' Sex, Bodies, and Emotions in Everyday Life: A Conference in Honour of John Gagnon, Glasgow New Caledonian University

November 24, 2010: 'The Sexuopharmaceutical Era: A "Second Sexual Revolution?" Women & Gender Studies Seminar Series, UBC, Vancouver

February 9, 2011: "Challenging the Medicalization of Women's Sexual Problems: Towards an Integrated Feminist Approach,"
Women's Studies noontime lecture series, Langara University

February 28, 2011: Traveling Speakers Series: "Learning About Sex and Love in the Post Viagra Age", Whitehorse, YT

February 28, 2011: Traveling Speakers Series: CBC Radio Interview CBC North with Sandi Coleman, Whitehorse, YT

February 28, 2011: Traveling Speakers Series: "Sex, Lies and Medicine: The Search for the 'Pink Viagra'", Whitehorse, YT

March 1, 2011: Traveling Speakers Series: "Challenging the Medical View of Women's Sexual Problems", Whitehorse, YT

Final Conference Report

The conference was inspired almost one year prior when Thea Cacchioni, professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at SFU testified against the FDA approval of the drug flibanserin, an ineffective and harmful daily anti-depressant drug proposed to treat women’s “low sexual desire.” It was there she first met members of the New View Campaign, a feminist scholar-activist group which has challenged the burgeoning sexual pharmaceutical industry since 2000. The FDA experience reminded Cacchioni of the potential power of international, cross-disciplinary alliance and coalition. Read more...

Print or save in pdf format (535 KB)

Female Sexual Dysfunction: Pharmaceutical sham or opportunity for empowerment?

BY THE F WORD

April 18, 2011: The fword talks about "The Medicalization of Sex" Co-op 102.7FM Radio (click to download or listen)

About the conference

April 28th-30th, 2011, Vancouver, Canada

Since the 19th Century, more and more areas of everyday life have been exposed to medical diagnosis, surveillance, and treatment, subject to psychiatric, surgical, and pharmaceutical intervention. Sex is no exception. The medicalization of sex is a complex and fascinating phenomenon which occurs at the intersection of technology, culture, medicine, gender, sexuality, global capitalism, and rapid social change. The Medicalization of Sex conference will critically examine historical and recent developments associated with the medical diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance of sex. The event, organized by Thea Cacchioni, Simon Fraser University’s Junior Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, will be held from April 28th-30th, 2011 at the Simon Fraser University's Segal School of Business (500 Granville Street) and the Woodward Cinema (149 West Hastings Street), with an off-campus event at the Gallery Gachet (88 East Cordova Street).

Conference objectives are to: bring together international, interdisciplinary junior and senior researchers, students, health practitioners, artists, and activists in order to create networking opportunities and encourage cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and inter-generational collaboration and knowledge transfer: to bring a range of topics on the medicalization of sex together in order to create links between discrete areas of study; to include internationally-known activists, educators, and health practitioners as a way of strategizing and celebrating strategies for resistance to the medicalization of sex at grassroots, academic and
policy levels.

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Public Events

Screening of Orgasm Inc: the strange science of female pleasure

Woodward’s Cinema

149 West Hastings Street (entrance off Cordova St.)

Date: Thursday, April 28th

Time: 7:00-9:15 p.m.

free with conference registration, $15 for guests not registered for the conference

free with conference registration, $15 for guests not registered for the conference

Tickets are $15 and will be sold at the door
starting at 6:00 p.m. the evening of the movie
for anyone who missed the registration process

For those of you who are not planning to attend the conference, please join us for this public event

About the Documentary

Orgasm Inc. is award-winning director Liz Canner’s first feature documentary. In the shocking and hilarious documentary ORGASM INC., filmmaker Liz Canner takes a job editing erotic videos for a drug trial for a pharmaceutical company. Her employer is developing what they hope will be the first Viagra drug for women that wins FDA approval to treat a new disease: Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). Liz gains permission to film the company for her own documentary. Initially, she plans to create a movie about science and pleasure but she soon begins to suspect that her employer, along with a cadre of other medical companies, might be trying to take advantage of women (and potentially endanger their health) in pursuit of billion dollar profits. ORGASM INC. is a powerful look inside the medical industry and the marketing campaigns that are literally and figuratively reshaping our everyday lives around health, illness, desireâ€”and that ultimate momentâ€”orgasm. Upbeat, engaging, enlightening, and provocative, ORGASM INC. will forever change the way you think about sex.

Art Exhibition titled, "Antidote"

one night only, Friday, April 29 from 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.
at the Gallery Gachet, 88 Cordova Street, Vancouver.
Jennifer Safronick, Curator

Click here for Antidote Poster (685 KB)

Click here for Downloadable New View Campaign poster (188 KB)

check out www.newviewcampaign.org

CONFERENCE DEFINITION

An interdisciplinary critique questioning the ways in which medicalization limits bodily and sexual diversity, constructs narrow definitions of what is sexually ‘normal’, imposes new forms of surveillance and control, serves profits over pleasures, and leads to serious physical and psychological health sideâ€effects.

Themes include:

- Deviant Bodies and Sexual ‘normalcy’

- Body diversity

- Asexualities/Queer Sexualities/Intersexualites/Heterosexualites

- Surveillance and Treatment (psychiatric, surgical and pharmaceutical interventions)

- Big Pharma Culture (Sexuopharmaceutical)

- Sexual Function/Dysfunction

- Market Searching Phenomenon

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Press Release

Click for Downloadable pdf version of Press Release (74 KB)

Program

Downloadable Printable Version available here! (pdf version 758 KB)

Abbreviated version below:

Here is an abbreviated program outline just to let everyone know the start and end times each day. This will help participants and attendees determine flight and hotel bookings.

Day 1 - Thursday, April 28, 2011
7:00 p.m. - 9:15 p.m.		Registration & Welcome Speeches plus Screening of Documentary: Orgasm Inc.: The Strange Science of Female Sexual Pleasure Welcome Evening at Woodward's Cinema, 149 West Hastings Street Vancouver. Q&A/Discussion afterwards.

Day 2 - Friday, April 29, 2011
8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.		Registration, talks and breakout sessions.
7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.		Art Reception: Antidote at Gallery Gachet, 88 Cordova Street, Vancouver. Curator: Jennifer Safronick (SFU).

Day 3 - Saturday, April 30, 2011
8:30 a.m. - 4:45 p.m.		Talks and breakout sessions.

Abstracts and Biographies (A-Z)

Quicklinks:

Keynote Speakers' Abstracts

Special Guests' Abstracts

Breakout Sessions Abstracts

Keynote Speakers

Jennifer Terry, Associate Professor

Women's Studies

University of California, Irvine

Transnational Sexual Politics:
Exporting Ex-Gay Therapies to the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America

Leonore Tiefer

New View Campaign

Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry

NYU School of Medicine

The New View Campaign:

A Case Study of Scholarship and Resistance to "Female Sexual Dysfunction" Disease Mongering

Special Guests

Virginia Braun
Department of Psychology
University of Auckland

The Not-So-Curious Case of the Designer Vagina

Liz Canner
Director of Orgasm Inc
Introduction and Discussion:

Orgasm Inc.: The Strange Science of Female Sexual Pleasure

Carol Groneman

History and Interdisciplinary Studies

CUNY

Nymphomania: A History

Rebecca Jordan-Young, Assistant Professor

Women's Studies

Barnard

Confessions of the Flesh: Aiming for Objective Measures of Desire

Barbara Marshall

Department of Sociology

Trent University

Sexualizing the Third Age: Medicalization and the Reconstruction of Sexual Life Courses

Elizabeth Reis, Associate Professor

Women’s and Gender Studies

University of Oregon

Intersex, Fetal Dex, and the Disordered Medical World

Judy Segal

Department of English

University of British Columbia

The (Re)Sexualization of the Medical

Breakout Sessions

Abstracts and Biographies (A-Z)

Katherine Angel

Centre for the History of Medicine

University of Warwick

Biological Psychiatry and Postfeminism in Female Sexual Dysfunction

Tara Bates

Gender, Work and Social Inquiry

University of Adelaide

"Who Cares what the DSM says?":
Reorienting Questions of Power and Docility
Concerning Psychiatrists' attitudes towards the DSM

Carellin Brooks, DPhil

Sessional Faculty, Women's and Gender Studies Program

University of British Columbia

The Medicalization of Breastfeeding

Monica Brown, PhD Student

Department of English

University of British Columbia

Revisiting Metaphors of Women’s Sexuality in Female Sexual Dysfunction

Dr Thomas Bryant

Historical and political Adult Education

Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin

University of Applied Sciences

Medicalization by Sterilization: Surgical Dealing with Sexual Deviancy in Imperial and Weimar Germany

Jessica Butler, PhD Candidate

Department of History

Boston College

Making Homosexuality Medical: Nazi Notions of Sexual Degeneracy

Alan Cassels, Drug Policy Researcher

University of Victoria

Pharma and the Male “Just Fix it” Mentality:
Why Men are and will Likely Continue to be the Main Market for Human Sexual Enhancement Drugs

Meghan Chandler
Visual Studies

UC Irvine

Sickness, Sexuality, Secrets:
The Erotic Anatonomies of Hannah Wilke and Annie Sprinkle

Carm De Santis, Adjunct Professor

Department of Sexuality, Marriage,

and Family Studies (SMF),

St. Jerome’s University

University of Waterloo

BJ Rye, Associate Professor

Psychology and Sexuality, Marriage,

and Family Studies Departments

St. Jerome’s University

University of Waterloo

Joint: “I May Look Like What You Want, but it Don’t Feel Good Anymore”:

The Impact of Medical Tampering on Women

with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome’s Sexuality

Rachel Hope Cleves

Assistant Professor, Department of History

University of Victoria

Contagion, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Sexuality among Antebellum American Girls

Jillian Deri,
PhD Candidate

Department of Sociology

Simon Fraser University

Gender Differences in Re-Imagining Jealousy in Polyamorous Relationships

Marion Doull, Postdoctoral Fellow

Youth Sexual Health Team, School of Population and Public Health

Faculty of Medicine

University of British Columbia

Subject, Object, or Both? Defining the Boundaries of “Girl Power”

Prof. Pat Elliot, Chair

Department of Sociology

Wilfrid Laurier University

Losing the Subject: A critical Reading of Bio-Reductive Theories of Transsexuality

Maral Erol, Lecturing Fellow

Thompson Writing Program

Duke University

Blaming Women, Helping Women: Medicalization of Sexuality in Menopause

Samantha Fashler

Pain Lab
University of British Columbia

The Sexual, Psychological and Body Image Health
of Women Undergoing Elective Vulvovaginal Plastic/Cosmetic Procedures

Trevor Floyd

Institute of Professional Psychology,

Manhattan Psychiatric Center

Dhat Syndrome: The Influence of Medicalization and Globalization on the Presentation
and Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction in South Asian Men

Jana Funke

University of Exeter

Sexual History Before The History of Sexuality:

Constructions of the Past in Havelock Ellis’ Studies In the Psychology of Sex

Lee Gale

Trans-activist

Press for Change

Jay McNeil

Trans-activist

Coordinator, TransBareAll

Joint: Testing Real Life

Jessi Gan, PhD Candidate

Program in American Culture

University of Michigan

Racial Language in Early Sexual Science

Trish Garner, PhD Student

Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies,

Simon Fraser University

“Manboobs” and the Failure to Achieve Heterosexuality

Alain Giami PhD

Gender, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Le Kremlin Bicetre, France

English Translation: Transformations in the Medicalization of Sex: HIV Prevention and the Disappearance of the Human Factor

French Translation: Transformations dans la medicalisation de la sexualitÃ©: la prÃ©vention du VIH et la disparition du facteur humain

Dr Robert Gillett

School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

Queen Mary University of London

Notes from an Initial Laundry: AIDS and the Queer Turn in the Medicalization of Sex


Dr. Mona Gleason, Associate Professor Department of Education University of British Columbia		Anika Stafford, PhD Student Centre for Women's and Gender Studies University of British Columbia
Summer Camp Special Services: Psychiatric Monitoring of Gender Nonconforming Children and their Families

Kristina Gupta, PhD Student

Department of Women's Studies

Emory University

Sex for Health: Representations of Sex as a Health-Promoting Activity

Bridget Gurtler, (PhD Candidate

Department of History

Rutgers University

From “Artificial Impregnation” to “Test-Tube Babies”:
Narratives in Nomenclature in the Early History of Artificial Insemination, 1850-1940

Prof. Dr Antje Kampf

Institute for the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine,

UniversitÃ¤tsmedizin der Johannes Gutenberg-UniversitÃ¤t

Urogenital borderlands: ductus ejaculatorius and the (un)making of Male Identities

Anita Kurimay, PhD candidate

Department of History

Rutgers University

Rehabilitating Sexual Abnormals: Queers and Hungary’s Soviet Criminology Tribunal

Christine Labuski

Postdoctoral Fellow

Centre for the Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality

Rice University

Diagnostic Delays: Seeking Relief for Vulvar Distress

Dr Dany Lacombe, Professor and Acting Chair

Dept of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University

Medicalization of Sex Offenders in Prison

Tracy Penny Light, PhD

Assistant Professor, Sexuality, Marriage, and Family Studies/History

St. Jerome's University

Being Normalâ€¦Surgically: The Medical Discourse on Cosmetic Surgery in the 20th Century

Amanda Lock Swarr

Assistant Professor, Women Studies, University of Washington

Medical Experimentation and the Raced Incongruence of Gender under Apartheid

Olga Marques, PhD Student, ABD

Department of Criminology

University of Ottawa

“Men Are Visual” and Other Porn Fallacies: The Mal(e)practice of Female Sexual Desire

Britta McEwen

Assistant Professor, Creighton University

Professionalizing the Personal: Eugenics and Sex Education in Interwar Vienna

Kathryn Pauly Morgan, PhD

Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto

Medico-Sexualized Therapeutic Contact:

“Therapeutic Erections?” or Acts of Eroto-Terrorism?

Loren A. Olson, MD

DLFAPA

Adonis Makes Me Sick

Treena Orchard

School of Health Studies,

University of Western Ontario

Arn Schilder, Researcher

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

Warren Michelow,

Epidemiologist

Drug Treatment Program

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

Robert Hogg

Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences

Simon Fraser University

and

Director, HIV/AIDS Drug Treatment Program

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

Joint: Dark Matter: The Almost Untold Story
of Rectal Douching Among Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM)

Eric Plemons, PhD Candidate

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

It Is As It Does: Genital Form and Function in Sex Reassignment surgery

Jessica Polzer

Department of Women’s Studies

and Feminist Research

Faculty of Health Sciences

University of Western Ontario

Susan Knabe

Department of Women’s Studies

and Feminist Research

Faculty of Information & Media Studies

University of Western Ontario

Joint: Risk, Biotechnology and the Neomedicalization of t(w)een Sexuality:
The Case of HPV Vaccination

Katherine Poole, PhD Candidate

Political Science, York University

Quantifying Pleasure: Medicine’s Sadean Narrative of Transgender Sexuality

Ana Porroche Escudero

Breast Cancer:
A Textbook Case of the Medicalization of Women's Sexuality

Ela PrzybyÅ‚o

Women’s Studies, University of Alberta

Disordering Lack Disorders: Asexuality and the Politics of “Not Doing It”

Judith Raiskin, Associate Professor

Women's and Gender Studies

University of Oregon

Tee Corinne vs. The Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Clinic:Can Art Trim Cosmetic Genitoplasty?

Sal Renshaw, PhD

Associate Professor & Chair,

Gender Equality & Social Justice/Religions and Cultures

Nipissing University

Screening Sex, Scripting Desire, Constructing Normal

Miriam Reumann

Department of History, University of Rhode Island

“Nothing More than a Normal Boy:”Peer Culture, Normalcy, and Sexual Modernity in the 1920s

Sylvie Rivard, Ph.D. candidate

Interdisciplinary Program in Rural and Northern Health

Laurentian University

After Gynaecological Cancer: Women's Experiences and Identity

Wrenna Robertson

Show Off Books

I'll Show you Mine:
A Celebration of the Vulva Diversity

Sara Rodrigues, MA Candidate

The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism

University of Western Ontario
The Will to Orgasm:
Vaginoplasty, Female Sexual 'Dysfunction' and the Biopolitics of Pleasure

Sarah Rudrum, PhD Student

Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, UBC

Orgasmic Birth and the Regulation of Women's Experiences

Jane Russo, Graduation Program

Public Health

Instituto de Medicina Social

State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Researcher, Latin-American Centre for Sexuality
and Human Rights (CLAM/IS/UERJ)

Fabiola Rohden, Graduation Program

Anthropology

Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Joint: Clinical Sexology in Contemporary Brazil:
the Professional Dispute among Divergent Medical Views on Gender and Sexuality


Dafna M. Sagiv-Reiss, PhD Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences Department of Nursing University of Haifa	Marilyn P. Safir, Director Project Kidma-for the Advancement of Women and Department of Psychology University of Haifa	Gurit E. Birnbaum School of Psychology Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya
Joint: I am Pregnantâ€”Not Sick: Changes in Sexual Experiences and Body Image Throughout the Trimesters of Pregnancy